MSI 915P Neo2 V2.0 - max size of HDD

[cesk22]

Hello guys!

I found my old pc yesterday and im tryin to build a "homemade" NAS. I wann to buy 2x1TB HDD for storage (i know i cant boot from that) but im not sure that my mobo supporting high size hdd. Can u help me find out what the max size of hdd can be supported by my mobo? Im started looking for answer on MSI site first but there is nothing about this mobo. thanks for the help.

 

[BFG-9000]

ICH6 southbridge supports 48-bit addressing so should be able to boot from up to a 2.2TB MBR disk, and to use larger GPT disks as nonbootable storage, unless MSI completely messed up the BIOS. As 1TB drives were already around when that board was new, you should easily be able to boot from one of the 1TB if you like. If you boot from something else then you could use disk management to make a simple Windows RAID 0 or 1 in software, or use Windows Storage Spaces to make a more complicated RAID arrangement. Or there's FreeNAS/NAS4free. The P4 should have plenty of power for parity calculations so it should perform better than many cheapo NAS appliances.

Keep in mind that Prescott P4s are known for high power consumption even at idle so probably aren't the best choice for an always-on NAS if you pay for electricity. Performance is also "limited" by the 150MB/s SATA-I ports, but at least unlike the many implementations at the time for AMD, ICH6 works fine with SATA-II and SATA-III drives without jumpering or firmware-limiting them to SATA-I. That's good because most recent drives no longer have that capability, plus it's all going to be limited by 125MB/s gigabit anyway.